Pick your battles.

Parents will often come to IEP meetings not sure what to ask for or in the alternative will often start to create full laundry lists of items only to find at the first IEP meeting that the IEP team shoots down all of them.   Sometimes there is one clear and essential need, for example, that the child learn to read. The parent may be spending their time debating about whether they should get 10 minutes a day of 1:1 instruction or 15. In reality, there is a much bigger picture.

You must also make sure that you are truly focusing on what is actually essential and what matters.   Many parents come to me having battled with the school regarding the child’s special education classification.  The school has classified the child as Other Health Impaired (OHI) and the parent believes that the child should be classified as Specific Learning Disability.   These debates have taken up time during their IEP meetings only for me to see that the time should have been spent developing appropriate goals and services.   The category of eligibility does not drive goals and services, the child’s needs - that’s what should drive goals and services.   If the student needs reading assistance our focus should be on scientifically tested and peer reviewed reading program specific to that child’s needs provided with consistency and fidelity in an amount of time necessary to help the student progress. Spending an hour arguing about the classification is going to be an hour wasted if the focus could have been instead on what is available and what is necessary in terms of services.

Learning how to distinguish the essential important battles and the ones that you can address in other areas of life or service is going to be an acquired skill over time.   This is why you again will need to very carefully analyze what is essentially needed and why.  

This is not to say that you cannot accomplish both or that the child in question should not have everything that they need, but rather how you prepare to become a true advocate is knowing not only which battles to pick but when.